Incremental Infrastructures

An analysis of informal water delivery and distribution networks that emerge within slums in Mumbai. The city is characterized by an incomplete municipal water infrastructure that requires the physical collection of water, as well as a demand that vastly exceeds the supply for drinking water. The maps document conditions that lead to the advent of water cartels, middlemen, hawkers, and illegal taps that constitute a protocological distribution network whose complexity and conditional logics resists conventional mapping. Data sets are developed that tabulate travel distance, carrying capacity, and available volume and mapped within a recursive node and line network organization in order to predict a set of social factors that include satisfaction and effort, and monetization and commodification, that suggest a context for a series of aid-based water management infrastructures, collection systems, and market systems, as well as a more ad hoc network of other municipally or civically minded informal infrastructures such as informal schools, pharm trading, and temporary clinics.